Introduction - Get It Together (1-1)

psikeout · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 12:52 am

"..."

Rock stood straight, and watched almost blankly. It was around when the ship got up and started walking that he casually scratched at an itch near his eyebrow.

"Dat ain't good," he slurred oh-so-profoundly. The hordes were about fifty yards away when he turned and... started trotting off in the other direction?

Rusty · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 2:44 am

"Nice," mumbled Elegant Joe, watching in alarmed regard with the others as all hell started breaking loose, exemplified by the billion-ton spidership that was about to use their city as a sidewalk. "I always wanted to die hopelessly fighting an invincible monstrosity of war and death."

"Should have picked a fight with Tally then," said Cross, earning an appropriately vexed look from his sniper even despite the circumstances and knowing that if the gigantic walking patrol boat didn't kill him first, she'd probably finish the job later.

He ordered them all behind some adjacent shipping crates. Cover before anything--it would do little to slow the ebb of robots that were flooding out of the numerous vessels, but they weren't about to stand out in the open. By then they were blasting away at anything that was coming within range and continued to do so when they'd gotten themselves situated.

"Major," Sparky yelled above the sheer roar of all the guns (worsened by McBride's endless and extremely loud taunting and heavy machinegun),"we don't have the kind of firepower to deal with this--"

"I know!" The raggedy-ass robots, they could handle; the bigass ship that thought it was an anime mech, not so much. "I--" ... And Cross spied one of the civilians booking it, one of the nosy monkeys who had gone speeding to the harbor moments earlier ahead of them. Yeah, great, now you leave, he thought. Thanks for the help. Oh well, whatever, leave it to the professionals anyway.

... Not that they could really do much either after they'd inevitably run out of ammo, but he'd worry about that later. "Just sit tight and keep hammering away!" That was all they could do for now.

Killey boomed a blast from his shotgun at a disheveled crab 'bot. It exploded like fireworks, metal and electronics raining every direction... and then it began to methodically put itself back together. "Ah, not this crap again. Here, catch." He unhooked a frag grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, tossed it into the big mass of broken parts, got back behind cover, and kaboom. After all, the easiest way to make something not do what you didn't want it to do was to make it not exist anymore.

Tau · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 3:27 am

(Again, Pardon if any things a bit rough.)
He sighed as he came to the conclusion it was probably a bit to late to avoid getting involved with what ever the hell had, and apparently still was going on. He couldn't exactly help but become a bit curious as to what was causing the the sounds himself having been passed out through the previous events, his interest only peaked as he caught a distant glimpse of the SSD members hauling off in the direction of the most recent thunderous sounds.” Might as well follow, eh?”

Having since removed the dull gray bandanna from his head and tied it around the lower half of his face, tucking the lower half in his vest in an attempt to keep the a for mentioned 'Dirty ass snow' from lodging itself in his nose and mouth, he stashed away a small stainless-steel flask in his vests inner breast pocket having just now finished filling the bottles remaining contents and proceeded to follow after the SSD on foot, all be it at a distance (As to not necessarily be noticed either by them, or what they were rushing towards). Myr in tow behind him as the chao held onto his pack in a hover.

By the time he'd arrived (Keeping some distance away from the scene, just barely close enough to get a look at was going on with the current visibility, still not wanting to get directly involved with any thing that required folks with guns to rush to, though still curious enough to want to see what was happening), Eggman, or at least what appeared to be the ghostly likeness of his head, had already begun to loose his patience and started to bark out his current demands only to follow up with a zombie robot horde pouring out of the distant wreckage. “ Yeeaaa... This.. really isn't helping my dislike of cities in general..“

Myr, having since hovered over Juneau's pack had positioned himself in a fashion akin to partially resting atop Juneau's head after they arrived in an attempt to see what was going on only to be met shortly after with a hand gesture to take the usual position in his pack right about the time the zombie robot horde made its appearance as Juneau responded by taking rather quick interest in heading back the way he'd come by the time they appeared and began to work his way away from the harbor area.

Mie · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 2:19 pm

Hypothetically speaking, even if Jam were the superstitious type (only to the smallest of immeasurably small degrees, though), and even if under any other circumstances, she might have thought about considering the possibility of taking a vengeful megalomaniacal specter taking vengeance from beyond the grave seriously, it was no less than completely ruined by the atmosphere.

Indeed, what had started out as an initial bristling of her fur, and jerky stumble backwards at the the sinister apparition's appearance, had, with influence from the surrounding incredulousness, disbelief, humor, exasperation and boredom, became much of the same. That's not to say, however, that she didn't jump about a mile out of her skin, at the booming imperative to listen, but she did start losing interest again by the time the not-so-friendly ghost started talking politics, and even moreso when Egghost decided to try his hand at stand-up (or float-up, or whatever).

In fact, probably the only thing the highly malleable monkey's impressionable anxiety was really able to take continuously seriously was the sudden lack of her snowy cohort. -- Huh? Clearly, she'd missed something.

Let's take role. Rock? Absent. SSD? Taking cover. Army of evil undead robots? Advancing. Big Daddy of zombie bots with hell's armory in tow? Inescapably present.

Simultaneous to her drooping ears, the gobsmacked simian began taking the first of several uncoordinated, too-slow steps backwards, while inanely muttering to herself,

"... That idn't good..."

Greens · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 4:21 pm

"Can you believe we moved here to get away from $%@& like this?"

Said the cat, eying the ghostly monstrosity haunting the city. He stood amongst the crowd like everyone else, which bothered him a bit, to be honest. With so many people drawn together here, it was like some vigilante convention (save for the SSD, who were actually paid and licensed to deal with such nonsense. Eggman must have expected it, and, ergo, Eggman must have prepared for it.

Oh, if only he knew.

Meanwhile Caz stood at his side, not really thinking so deeply about the situation, but instead, just taken with the spectacle of it all. Like, 'Is this really happening? Of course not. This is far too absurd.' And as such, she failed to take it very seriously at all. Everyone was here. Her invincible Ace was here. And the only enemy she could see was the mustachio'd Wizard of Oz (who, last she recalled, turned out to be a total joke, anyway).

"If you ask me, Egg-man,"

"You don't have--," she said, moving her teashades from the hem of her skirt to her eyes, adopting the world's biggest shit-eating grin, and pointed her finger at the doctor's spectral head.

"--a ghost of a chance."

YYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

And she crossed her arms, leaning back and giggling to herself... as the monstrous shadow of Cargotron slowly enveloped the harbor.

"...Eheh heh heh heh, heheh, heh, ooooohhh ssshhhhoot..."

"Ah, crap," Ace blurted intelligently, scrambling to assume some kind of fighting stance. He was far too focused on the sudden and massive attack he was about to face to notice anyone leaving the scene, and inched closer towards Caz. "Alright, okay," he muttered in a half-panic, and did what little he could... sliding out his cards from the pouches on his wrists, charging them a ghostly blue, and hurling them into the noses of the 'bots so quickly surrounding them.

"Come on!"

nUcLeArEnVoY · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 6:45 pm

Yadda, yadda, yadda, blahdy-blahdy-blahdy-bloo. Yep, that's the grain of salt Teck took Eggman's haughty rhetoric with - even when it branched off into what he thought were no more than empty threats towards the island's political backing. Alas, he then realized that Eggman was not exactly bluffing. With each thunderous step of those spindly, awkward legs that elevated the *entire freakin' ship* off the ground and, of course, the looming stampede of rusted grunts, his jovial outlook faded as dim as the very sky that covered them.

One step back, NO steps forward... two steps back, NO steps forward... there was clearly a pattern here as Teck stuttered impishly, "Oooookk-k-kay, Cheerio folks--see ya later-pip-pip!"

And so he ran. Indeed, Teck was always a stickler for action, but God bless his soul; he just doesn't have the androgens to stick around and play Joe Badass with the tacky one-liners and puffed out chest.

The two primates were well on their way and in only a matter of seconds did the fleet-footed porcupine catch up, adjusting his momentum to maintain retrograde motion. "BLIMEY, did you see that damn thing, nah!? It's gonna make mincemeat of an already minced meat! Do you two have any ideas, this is YOUR turf!" He pressed, his tone rather accusatory towards the end of the remark.

psikeout · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 7:26 pm

"Ideas?" Rock echoed over the rushing wind. Teck and Jam would soon notice that, with a little distance gained, he was slowing down, and his eyes were darting all over the place.

Resources. In a second or two's time, Rock mentally went over what was at his disposal. Loading cranes. (No guaranteed operation; power may be out, may require key.) Boats. (Going out to sea: Dumb.) Forklifts. (Suicide machines.) Parked 18-wheelers. (No keys; no time to play wiseguy vandal and try to hotwire something.) ... But there was a group of trucks jammed in a partial fender bender leaving the shipyard, their doors hanging open as if they'd been abandoned when the attack first started. (They'd probably have keys in them.)

Rock turned abruptly and ran toward them. Some had cargo; some had headlights on. One had an empty flatbed and headlights on. As he got nearer to it, he could hear its engine still running over the rest of the noise. That was the winner.

It may seem like a lot of consideration, but in actuality, it only took Rock a couple seconds to answer: "Idea to win right now? No. Idea to keep those feds from gettin' slaughtered? Maybe. I may know somebody who's got a clue, but for now we gotta get outta here."

He leaped into the driver's side of the truck's cab and slid the tattered, ripped seat forward. It looked almost as if the driver had been clawed out of place by something. Without further delay, once his party was on board, he put the truck in gear (with a little bit of a grind—He wasn't exactly used to those huge trucks with their huge shifters and huge everything else), and jolted the vehicle into motion, metal crunching and grinding as he rammed and steered the truck free from the little collision it had been in, and sent it roaring toward the group holding out behind that big stack of cargo containers.

*Grind, rev, grind, rev...*

"How many damn gears 'this thing have..."

Mie · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 8:16 pm

Rock would barely have time to scoot out of the way before the decidedly flustered primate at his heels dove into the driver's side across his lap after him, just barely avoiding a very uncomfortable hug from the steering wheel. Truth be told, she hadn't been paying too much attention to their de facto leader's audible line of thought, so when their uncooperative getaway vehicle started groaning back towards the harbor, Jam sunk down in her seat.

"Laz," she gulped almost inaudibly, her wide green eyes locked unblinkingly onto the trundling Deceivatron. "I know your heart's in th'right place, man, but if you haven' noticed, this ain't a tank, and we're a lot less armed than those other guys."

Her tail was in about three separate knots.

Rusty · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 9:09 pm

"Hey, Major." Rather than focus on the unending wave of enemies, Elegant Joe seemed to have placed his interest in something else. "What would you say if I told you there was a gigantic eighteen-wheeler semi truck careening off the rails straight at our current position?"

"I'd say shut up and keep shooting." Pop-pop-pop went Cross' SMG. What Joe had said only then seemed to really register with him... "... Why?"

"No reason. Well, okay, if you really want to know, it's because there's a gigantic eighteen wheeler semi TRUCK CAREENING OFF THE RAILS STRAIGHT AT OUR CURRENT POSAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH"

Not a single one of those guys (and girl) didn't go flailing for anywhere that truck wasn't headed. Cross sailed behind another shipping crate, Joe and Sparky's thrusters thoomed, Killey and Tally bulldozed through Zanetti and somehow managed to drag him along, McBride stared down the truck until he finally squeaked "oh f**k this" and skittered away like a spooked deer, and anyone else just kind of ran in a panic.

In a nutshell, Rock's plan worked. Hopefully he also had a plan for what they were going to do when they saw the first opportunity to do so, which was put about ten million bullets into the semi's cab.

psikeout · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 9:44 pm

OOC: Not trying to jump ahead without seeing what Teck does, but I want to clarify what happened here before the scene gets massively misunderstood. So if Teck's onboard, that's great; if not, that's great too. Whichever.

"We'll just get'em and go," explained the monkey. "It'll be good to have some guys with guns with us. Doubt we'll even have to come to a full... stop."

Rock made an entirely dumbfounded, slack-jawed, eye-squinting look at the gun-toting squad as its members went fleeing in raw terror from his hijacked truck. In unison with McBride's squeak of horror was the squeak of the brakes as the big hauler rolled to a relatively peaceful stop next to where the squad had been and let out a telltale pneumatic puff. Well, it was peaceful save for the sounds of robots stuck to its grill falling off and getting crunched under its wheels. Actually, yeah, maybe it did seem a little out of control with the way it was jostling and bouncing and crushing things most of the way there.

"These people don't know a friggin' rescue vehicle when they see one," he complained to his passenger(s). "What'd they wanna see, a tank?"

Nonetheless, he blew the horn a couple times in hopes that they'd get the message that he was there to help.

Greens · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 10:42 pm

For all the progress Ace seemed to be making-- oh, who was he kidding. Ace was not making any damn progress whatsoever. Lucky he was that his cards managed to at least stall the little guys, he'd be damned if that was actually getting him anywhere. He blows some robo-schmuck's head off? Great. Watch as it reassembles right back on it's stupid, haunted shoulders. And as much as it pissed him off, it also started getting him to worry. There was finishing a fight, and their was walking into the fire. This was clearly not the former.

And Caz? Just barely hanging onto her cool. She'd scooped a lead pipe that she was very keen on holding close to her in a panic, but Ace was keeping any would-be attackers at bay... but for how much longer?

"Oh God oh God oh s**t oh God oh s**t oh God"

Her chest was heaving, her eyes were darting, and her heart rate soared through the roof. Truth be told? She was really scared. Somebody just changed the channel from a disaster film to a war film, and she didn't like it one bit.

"Ah, damnit," he rasped, wasting another five cards on another five robots. "Where the hell is everyone!?" Things were seriously getting out of hand, but just as a particularly large batch of machines inched a bit too close for comfort, in rolled the most beautiful, shining 18-wheeler the cat had ever laid his eyes on... crushing the competition.

"Hello, plan B."

Ace beamed with cheer.

"CAZ, TRUCK, GO!"

"I'M GOING, I'M GOING!"

Admin · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 11:45 pm

The crew getting rescued by the truck had a few blessings to count. First of all, the big, malformed, modified patrol boat was trundling toward town, not toward them. Dr. Eggman was not concerned squads of guys with little plinky guns, and even less concerned with no-name adventurers trying to play hero. If asked, he would readily declare that he got enough crap like that from Sonic's furry friends.

Secondly, the onslaught of robots was not entirely focused on them, either; most of the machines were following the goofy looking gunboat, some even getting crushed under its feet (only to cobble back together by some unseen force and continue on). Those that were after Ace, Caz, and the SSD guys were troublesome to say the least, however. See, the really bad thing about those robots wasn't just that they were seemingly indestructible, but also that they were inordinately intelligent, and kind of antagonistic. They didn't just lumber and slog along toward their targets; they skittered and weaved, and let loose little cackly-sounding noises as they swerved and dodged shots, made flailing gestures (some of which looked rude!), stirred up dust, and even threw things—Seashells, barnacles, globs of seaweed, and even parts of their own bodies. None of them seemed to have operable weapons, so they resorted to whatever they could grab and hurl until they got within clobbering, swiping or slashing range, depending on their form.

The sampling was pretty much anything one could imagine from Eggman's lineup, as obsolete as crusty little flat-tired Motobugs, and as new as creaking, lumbering Egg Pawns. Some moved faster than others, and some flew—There was even an apparently superior, fast moving unit that blazed through the mix in a streak of orangish color, its single glowing red light beaming bright somewhere out there, but it vanished into the mix before it could be clearly identified. It didn't matter, anyway; the primary concern was with the things that were moving toward the truck; if the heroes took much longer to run for it, the thing's engine wouldn't have the power to push forward through the crowd.

Rusty · Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 12:45 am

The squad of helmets rose from wherever they'd gone skittering off to, no doubt utterly nerve-wracked and thankful for the eventual realization that the trucker from hell was actually the trucker from... heaven...? Or something... It was a guy in a truck trying to help them, you know.

Elegant Joe rose from where he'd dove to the ground, and looked around to find pretty much everyone else in the same uniform he wore looking rather displeased with him.

"What?"

...

"What? He was flying right at us! It was like he'd taken some crazy pills! He should have his license taken away!" He jumped onto the flatbed. "After we get out of here."

"Hahahaaaagonnakillyou," growled McBride, clamoring onto the flatbed after him. "F**kin' robot."

It was probably the right decision to hop on. They had already expended a lot of ammo, and there was no end in sight to the wave of clunkers, so Cross hauled himself on too and blasted away at the oncoming horde now focused on the truck while they waited for anyone else who needed a ride to get their asses onboard. He'd taken notice that the driver was the same one who'd started running off--he'd have to thank the civvie later, if they got out of this without getting mauled first.

Next to him was Tally, who had the maw of her rifle pointed deep into the masses, and she seemed to be struggling to keep up with something nestled among the wave of metal and steel. Her eye left the scope and whatever she'd seen clearly concerned her. "H'oh, crap."

Elegant Joe scuttled to the side of the flatbed and held his hand down for the approaching mole. "Your chariot awaits, my dear."

nUcLeArEnVoY · Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 9:22 am

Meanwhile, the absolute abruptness of the whole snafu put a dire hold on Teck's usual resourcefulness. By now he'd have had a plan. Yet this time, whilst Rock, Jam, and the feds did all they could to cure the crisis, so to speak, Teck stood there like "HUH?"

He then had an idea...

A risky one... one that might not work... hell, who was he kidding? It probably wouldn't, but it was the only one he could come up with that A.) hasn't already been put into motion by someone else and B.).... was just in light of the circumstances.

As Jam was probably in the passenger seat, Teck kept his head poked inside the cabin through the flatbed access window. As Rock drove, most of Teck's remarks were silly questions until he posed a very particular one, asking blankly in the midst of a very violent jerk as the truck made roadkill of another robot, "'Ey, do you think that ship has a core of some sort? I have a particular trump card that could give it the ole' heave-ho if it does!"

psikeout · Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 12:21 pm

A core...

By the time that question was posed, the truck was rumbling on its way once more, jostling through the trainyard in the same general direction as the gunboat, headed for town. They still had time to decide whether they should pursue or regroup.

Rock considered for a few seconds.

"Anybody find a core in the little ones?" he answered question for question, having to kind of yell over the roar of the engine, wind, and distant explosions. "I know I tried—" He shot attention back forward suddenly and winced when some wooden gate arms barricading their path snapped like twigs, and smacked into and cracked the windshield before flying over the top of the truck in splinters. "—I tried, 'n I beat some to nuts'n'bolts and I didn't find crap, but hey, keep talkin' if you got an idea!"

Introduction - Get It Together (1-1)

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